Award-winning photojournalist and writer Sara Terry, who has documented the aftermath of war in Bosnia and Sierra Leone, is in Milwaukee this week as the 2012 peacemaker-in-residence at Marquette University's Center for Peacemaking.

Terry is the founder of the Aftermath Project, a nonprofit grant program that helps photographers cover the aftermath of conflict around the world. Faith and spirituality reporter Annysa Johnson spent a few minutes with Terry on Tuesday. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Q: The mission of the Aftermath Project is to help broaden the public's understanding of the true cost of war. What is that true cost?

A: I think the true cost of war is the generational damage to civil society, to people's lives, to our own human condition. The cost of war lasts for generations. It's not a neat and tidy moment when the headlines stop. The end of violence doesn't mean peace.

Q: What has your work taught you about humanity?

A: That fundamentally there is a great goodness at the heart of each one of us, and that everything that appears to be inhuman . . . tries to make people be what they're not.

Q:Your first film, "Fambul Tok," will be screened at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Alumni Memorial Union. Tell us about it.

A: "Fambul Tok" grew out of a still photography project I was doing about forgiveness traditions in post-conflict African countries. In the course of that collaboration with Libby Hoffman from Catalyst for Peace, I met John Caulker the Sierra Leonean human rights activist who had the idea for the program but no funding because the international community essentially laughed at his idea of dealing with reconciliation at the grass-roots level using cultural traditions. The film grew out of that. It's the story of how this program came to be, and it's studded with stories of forgiveness. It's the story of the rebirth of a culture that believes that conflict is best dealt with through conversation and that true justice is in the restoration of relationships.

Q: Is war essential to man's nature? And, if not, what can we do to end what seems like an endless cycle?

A: I think war has been an ongoing outcome of our inability to understand our humanity, and unfortunately, there's been a long history of that. I don't think it's a necessary part of the human condition. But it's clear from the ongoing nature of conflict . . . that we aren't asking the right questions. . . . That's what the Aftermath Project is about, trying to ask better questions. . . . It's only in exploring our humanity and defending our own goodness that we can truly deal with conflict.